HPSF Conference 2025

Spack 1.0 will feature faster builds through multi-package parallelism. In this talk, I’ll describe how I accelerated Spack’s package installation process by parallelizing its main installer loop. By enabling Spack to spawn multiple package builds concurrently, this feature increases available parallelism and significantly reduces overall build times for multi-package installations. I'll talk about the design decisions, tradeoffs, and performance gains achieved, providing valuable lessons for optimizing package builds on platforms from laptops to large-scale HPC environments. I’ll also talk about how, even as a a relatively new Spack user, I was able to come up to speed quickly and contribute meaningful improvements to the project.